Local telephone service providers have historically set a high standard for quality and reliability. For example, the traditional measure of reliability has been five nines or 99.999% reliability, which translates to just five minutes and fifteen seconds of downtime per year. The service providers have achieved these high standards by rigorously controlling the methods for development and deployment of new services and features in their legacy telecommunications infrastructures. However, as telecommunications technology evolves, and as the competitive environment changes, these conventional methods have become impediments to the service provider's ability to successfully compete against providers using new and faster, but not necessarily better, methods.
In a legacy system, the service provider must perform a multitude of steps to develop, test, and deploy a single service. These steps include changes to provisioning systems, billing systems, and customer support methods as well as changes to marketing and sales plans. The costs involved in these changes can amount to millions of dollars for each new service. The high cost of a new service deters the service provider from offering a service for which the service provider has difficulty estimating the size of the target market or for which the service provider knows only a small market exists. To remain competitive, service providers have a need to minimize these costs for new services.
One way in which service providers are attempting to minimize the costs of service development and deployment is to begin to transition their legacy systems to newer, faster, and more flexible systems, such as those based on the Internet protocols. These new systems hold great promise for service provisioning, support, and billing. These newer systems provide efficiency and cost benefits to service providers and provide benefits to subscribers as well, including graphical user interfaces that allow the subscriber to control complicated services through simple commands and that provide great flexibility to subscribers with more advanced skills. Furthermore, the majority of conventional programming and network advances focus on Internet service development and support, such as Java and similar languages, encryption and authentication procedures, multimedia compression and congestion access control, and network management.
One challenge facing the service provider is successfully managing the transition. Service providers have begun some measures to integrate the legacy and newer systems, such as adding softswitches and application servers, but one key challenge remains—maintaining quality and reliability while increasing the speed of development and deployment of new services. Service providers have a need for systems and methods that allow the rapid development and deployment of advanced telephony services, including Internet protocol based services, in conventional, legacy telecommunications infrastructures.